Clean water is essential for all of us. It is basic. The water here for the refugees to drink comes from a couple of main sources.

Most people from the camps walk a quarter-mile north or south to fill gallon jugs or five gallon buckets from the Massacre River reservoir (south) or from a little river on the border called Riviere Cassoude (north) that empties into Pedernales, Dominican Republic.

At both sites there are Haitian UNICEF workers who add clorox to the jug or bucket of water with a syringe. However, I watched some people drink water straight from the reservoir pipe today.

Regarding food, it is difficult to say where the food comes from other than “Port-au-Prince”, as well as from the Catholic Church in Anse (Immaculate Conception de Lourdes). This morning I watched the children line up with metal plates to get their daily scoop of rice and beans. I saw no bean sauce, vegetables, or meat of any type.

A lady in the camp named Marie, who lives in Anse, told me that she works in the camps as a counsellor. She instructs people how to avoid cholera and involves them in church. She also works closely with Haiti’s child welfare services department called Bien-Etre Sociale. According to the Bien-Etre Sociale official who was present this morning there are approximately five hundred children in these two camps. This child welfare official places refugee children who have been alone in the camps with families in Haiti.

Estafanie is nine years old. He father is Dominican and her mother is Haitian. Both of her parents are in the DR. She left the camp today on the back of a motorcycle with the Bien-Etre Sociale worker with a big smile on her face. She will be placed with a Haitian family.

Estefanie (Photo by John Carroll–September 17, 2015)

Marie told me there had been three deaths in these two camps during the last four months. Their ages were 50 years old, 25 years old, and the other was four years old. (I didn’t ask their gender.) When I asked Marie what they died from she said they were “sick” and cited diarrhea, vomiting and fever.

Diolane (Photo by John Carroll–September 17, 2015)

The nine-year old child above is Diolone and she is 9 years old. Apparently about four months ago she developed a distended painful abdomen. It sounded like a bowel obstruction to me. Somehow her mother had the child checked by the Haitian MSPP doctor (Haitian government doctor) in Anse-a-Pitres. He saw that she was critically ill and wrote a letter which allowed both of them to re-enter the Dominican Republic even though her mother did not have “proper papers”. (Mother told me she has lived for 27 years in the Dominican.)

Diolone’s mother also said that she paid for a Dominican ambulance to take her daughter five hours to the Dominican capital of Santo Domingo where the surgeons operated on her abdomen. They created a colostomy and she and Diolone arrived back in the camp three days ago. She has no material for her colostomy except a piece of fabric she wraps around it.

Diolone’s mother also told me this morning that she paid 340 dollars US for her daughter’s surgery and her hospitalization in Santo Domingo. (I highly doubt this.) She said she made the money buying and selling things along the border. The child’s next appointment is November 10 when they will attempt to “hook her back up”. Her mother says she has no idea how she will pay for this.

And to be honest about this, I think Diolone’s chances of survival with a bowel obstruction were better from here in is this terrible camp than if she lived in Cite Soleil in Port-au-Prince.

Blind and deaf toddler in Refugee Camp–Anse-a-Pitres (Photo by John Carroll–September 17, 2015)

The above little one was feeding himself alone this morning. When he felt that he dropped one kernel of rice he moved his bowel to make sure he caught it. He is blind and deaf and was alone. A man sitting a ways a way from him said he was his father but when I asked his name, the man did not know.

Anse-a-Pitres Refugee Camp(Photo by John Carroll–September 15, 2015)

These children are obviously being treated terribly by both Dominican and Haitian authorities.

From Crof Killian:

“Child health and our human responsibility are formalized by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1989 and ratified globally thereafter. The Lancet Series on child maltreatment examined the Convention and highlighted six provisions, including “special protection measures, such as for refugee children, those in the juvenile justice system, and those belonging to a minority group”.

1 thought on “Refugee Camps–Anse-a-Pitres (September 17, 2015)”

What’s worse is that if you travel throughout the farm towns of the Dominican Republic you will find the same conditions but at a much grander scale. There are hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in these conditions in the Dominican Republic.